Word: bouguereau
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, 'That's a pretty little thing,' after I had finished a picture." He had a reputation for misogyny, mainly because he rejected the hypocrisy about formal beauty embedded in the salon nudes of Bouguereau or Cabanel -- ideal wax with little rosy nipples. "Why do you paint women so ugly, Monsieur Degas?" some hostess unwisely asked. "Because, madam, women in general are ugly." This was a blague...
...Third Empire. (Pompier means "fireman," and the allusion is to the heroic nudes with Greek helmets, resembling the casques of the Paris fire brigade, that infested beaux arts academic painting.) Cachin and her colleagues have dredged up an astounding panoply of period kitsch, from 1850s imitators of Ingres through Bouguereau to what must be the most obsessively pederastic elocution in all art history, Jean Delville's School of Plato, featuring Alcibiades and his willowy friends yearning like blessed damsels at the lucky philosopher in a landscape full of wisteria and white peacocks. Woven through these galleries are some...
...imagine, by dint of stubborn labor," he wrote to a critic shortly before his death. He wanted his work to be a homemade replica of the values enshrined in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, as manifested in the big French Salon painters: Jean-Leon Gerome, Adolphe-William Bouguereau, Felix-Auguste Clement. He loved their important subjects, their grasp of the colonial exotic, their professionalism and high finish. So when artists 40 years his junior like Picasso and Delaunay paid him their semireverent homages, he took them as his due without interesting himself much in their paintings. He patted the Young...
...catalogue essay, Pearlstein "resumed what an avant-garde some three-quarters of a century earlier had proclaimed to be academic"-modeled painting of the naked human body. The studio nude, posed, had been the very protein (or, to its detractors, the basic starch) of salon painting from Ingres to Bouguereau. It was thrust into eclipse by impressionism because it carried an aura of the posed, the stagy, the allegorical, and post-impressionism finished it off. The nude became a casualty of the means painters chose to assert their pictorial honesty: the near religious cult of flatness. The intricate bumps...